Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture

Rebecca L. Stein is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is a coeditor of The Struggle for Sovereignty in Palestine and Israel (forthcoming).Ted Swedenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past and a coeditor of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, also published by Duke University Press.

“Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg’s volume Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture makes an invaluable contribution to the growing field of Middle Eastern cultural studies. Refusing essentialist understandings of culture, the editors and authors also transcend traditional Marxist paradigms. The volume insightfully illuminates the often marginalized issue of the politics of culture within the contested terrain of Palestine and Israel.”-Ella Shohat, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Studies, New York University “This empirically rich, theoretically innovative, and unusually wide-ranging volume brings together a set of fascinating and insightful explorations of the popular culture and cultural politics of Palestine/Israel, including music, cinema, television, cyberculture, tourism, comics, and the role of Israel and the Jews in U. S. evangelical Christian eschatology. By demonstrating how culture has been a crucial and often formative domain of contention both within and between Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine over the past century and down to the present day, the contributors open up a great deal of extremely valuable terrain that has been sorely neglected until now.”-Zachary Lockman, author of Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism “This theoretically savvy, eye-opening tour through popular culture in and about Palestine and Israel confirms at once the inherent inseparability of culture/politics and the gripping mutuality of Israel/Palestine.”-Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt "[P]rovocative. . . . [T]he essays in this volume . . . imaginatively deconstruct aspects of popular culture still seeping across the walls erected through this long and intractable conflict." - Donna Robinson Divine (Digest of Middle East Studies)

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Popular Culture, Transnationality, and Radical History / Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg 1I. Historical Articulations Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Popular Music, and Early Modernity in Jerusalem / Salim Tamari 27The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere / Mark LeVine 51Post-Zionism and Its Popular Cultures / Ilan PappÉ 77II. Cinemas and Cyberspaces Cross/Cast: Passing in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema / Carol Bardenstein 99Virtual Nation: Palestinian Cyberculture in Lebanese Camps / Laleh Khalili 126Is There a Palestinian National Cinema?: The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production / Livia Alexander 150III. The Politics of Music Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music / Joseph Massad 175Dueling Nativities: Zehava Ben Sings Umm Kulthum / Amy Horowitz 202Against Hybridity: The Case of Enrico Macias/Gaston Chrenassia / Ted Swedenburg 231IV. Regional and Global Circuits "First Contact" and Other Israeli Fictions: Tourism, Globalization, and the Middle East Peace Process / Rebecca L. Stein 259Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Evangelicalism's New World Order / Melani McAlister 288Telling Stories in Palestine: Comix Understanding and Narratives of Palestine-Israel / Mary Layoun 313Sentimentality and Redemption: The Rhetoric of Egyptian Pop Culture Intifada Solidarity / Elliott Cola 338Bibliography 365Contributors 397Index 401